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30 May 2006
GPPi fellow discusses African oil states at World Bank conference in Tokyo
GPPi fellow Ricardo Soares De Oliveira discussed the development prospects of African oil states on a panel at the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) which was held in Tokyo from May 29-30 2006.
Soares De Oliveira argued that with oil prices remaining fairly high in the medium term due to increased demand and tight supplies, oil rich-states in Africa will benefit from one of the largest inflows of resources into Africa in history. African oil windfalls could be used for reaching the Millennium Development Goals and launching broad-based, sustainable development.
The policy tools for promoting transparency, macroeconomic management, and improvement in institutional quality and governance exist to achieve this result. Soares De Oliveira argued that this "potentially great opportunity can also be a grave danger. If improperly used, the windfall could stop reform efforts, fuel authoritarianism and state violence, lead to wasteful investment in vanity projects, ostentatious consumption, and the dissipation of an important chance to tackle the impoverishment of the vast majority of citizens in these oil-rich countries. We should keep this latter possibility very much in mind not due to ingrained pessimism, but because this was indeed the sad outcome of oil booms in 1973, 1979 and 1991." Soares De Oliveira pointed out that the absence of meaningful domestic constituencies committed to reform and inconsistent international pressure for reform in an era of increasing global resource competition means that development outcomes may indeed not be very different from those of earlier windfalls.
Soares De Oliveira is a Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge and the author of the forthcoming Petroleum and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea (C. Hurst & Co. Publishers). He will teach a session on "Oil and the quest for transparency and good governance" at the upcoming Hertie School of Governance executive seminar on global public policy in Berlin.